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New Halo: Reach Xbox to Sport 360 Design, Custom Sound

A limited-edition version of the Xbox 360 console themed around the upcoming game Halo: Reach will be packed with the game and two controllers.Image courtesy Microsoft

Microsoft will release a limited-edition Xbox 360 console themed around Halo: Reach this fall, it said Thursday night at Comic-Con International.

The Halo-inspired Xbox will be released on the same day as the new shooter, Sept. 14. It will have all the bells and whistles of the recently released Xbox 360 redesign, from built-in Wi-Fi to a 250-gigabyte hard drive. A new paint job and custom sounds trick out the machine with Halo flair. Bundled with two similarly customized controllers and a copy of the game, the package will cost $400.

Bungie and Microsoft say that they spent a great deal of time adorning the limited-edition box with visual and audio references to the world of Halo.

"We used the ONI as the backdrop for the console," said Bungie designer Jim McQuillan to Wired.com in an exclusive pre-show interview. McQuillan was referring to the shadowy Office of Naval Intelligence, a key part of the fiction of the popular shooter series.

The controllers and headset microphone included with the Halo: Reach Xbox 360 will be customized similarly to the console.Image courtesy Microsoft

The imagery and text on the console isn't just gibberish, Microsoft says. It will all have meaning for Halo die-hards.Image courtesy Microsoft

Players should think of the console as a real-life version of an in-game artifact, "the archive reader for the last remaining days of Reach," said McQuillan. "We wanted something that felt high-tech, something that you would see rows and rows and racks of in a military installation."

The console will appear inside the game, said Microsoft industrial designer Claire Gerhardt. "You have this console in your living room and then you go through the levels and you see it in a lab," she said. "It's badass."

The sounds that the machine makes are also cued to the Halo world. For instance, when you press the disc eject button, you hear the sound of the Spartan character's energy shields charging up – music to the ears of any Halo player.

The limited-edition Xbox also has a surprising custom paint job, says Gerhardt.

"One thing that's interesting that you can't see in any photography is that the console is painted with two different shades of gray," she said. "Depending on how you hold the console, the metallic finish, the grays kind of shift."